Railroad car

“ To follow further the rapid development of the railroad in America would require many volumes. As the canal building fever had seized the fancy of the American public in preceding years, so a similar enthusiasm was instantly kindled in the new railroad, and railroad travel became immediately the most popular diversion. In a relatively few years a web of track carried the smoking locomotive and its rumbling train of cars throughout the country. Crude, and lacking almost every convenience of the passenger coach of the present day, the early railway carriage served fully its new-born function. ”

“ Surely there's nothing to equal motoring as a means of seeing the country. Not only are the constant change of landscape and constant succession of new scenes which the railway traveler may enjoy, to be had in an automobile but more—very much more.
The motorist gains a great deal that the railroad passenger inevitably misses. For the man on the train the musical clang of the dinner bell as one passes near some farmhouse, for instance, is lost—swallowed up in the noise and rush of the locomotive. ”

“ It is to become universal; the wooden car will become extinct upon American railroads almost as soon as the present equipment is worn out and sent to the scrap-heap.
Of the forms and varieties of railroad passenger coaches there are many, and these will be described when we come to consider in a later chapter the luxury of modern railroad travel. But the variety of passenger equipment quite pales before that of the freight service. Flat-cars, coal-cars, box-cars, grain-cars, live-stock cars—the list runs on into catalogue form. ”

“ This new equipment is being used at first upon the main lines and through trains, where both speed and density of traffic demand the railroad’s best equipment. Gradually it will be spread to the trains and branch lines of less importance.
With the wooden car still a factor in railroad equipment, the carpenter has not yet lost his vocation in the shops. There is much of the coarser work on the freight cars for him; in the elaborate passenger coaches, dining-cars and other equipment of that class, the great mass of cabinet work still demands the cunning of his hands. ”

“ It is one of the evidences of the constant bettering of the American railroad, the steady effort to bring it to an economical and scientific basis.
Recently some of the railroads have made intelligent experiments, seeking to devise a vehicle that should be both locomotive and car, and that should be especially adapted for small side-lines, where traffic runs exceedingly light. Some success has been found in the use of a passenger coach, into which a gasolene engine has been introduced, and several of these cars are in regular use in the West. ”

“ The private car originated in the need for special equipment for particular purposes. It was clear that the transportation of live-stock, fruit, vegetables, and other perishable products might be facilitated by the use of special cars. When the inventors of improved stock cars and refrigerator cars went to the railroad managers, they were informed that the railroads had no money with which to make experiments in such lines, but if cars that would do the work proposed were constructed the railroads would be glad to hire them for a fair rental. ”

“ The steam vehicle for stationary purposes, and also for the locomotive, were being rapidly developed and refined. The railroad settled down to the idea of a power unit drawing numerous wagons. That has been consistently adhered to to the present day, and only in the past decade have we gone back to the old and first principles of embodying the mechanical propelling means in the same vehicle that transports the passengers or goods. ”

“ But in the early fifties these very inconveniences fired the imagination of a young traveler who had bought a ticket on a night train between Buffalo and Westfield, and in his alert mind was inspired, as he tossed sleepless in his bunk, the first vision of a car that would revolutionize the railroad travel of the world and of a system that would present to the traveling public a mighty organization whose first purpose would be to contribute safety, convenience, luxury and a uniform and universal service from coast to coast. ”

“ There is perhaps no mechanical subject in which improvements has advanced so rapidly, within the last ten years, as that of railroad passenger cars. Let any person contrast the awkward and uncouth cars of '35 with the superbly splendid long cars now running on several of the eastern roads, and he will find it difficult to convey to a third party, a correct idea of the vast extent of improvement. ”

“ When it was first proposed to substitute steam propulsion for the horse it was not realized that a rail would furnish enough traction to permit of hauling heavy loads, and some of the early locomotives that ran on rails were provided with toothed wheels that engaged in racks alongside the rails. In fact, the earliest locomotives were not built to run on rails but on ordinary roads; in other words, they were automobiles. The motor car can therefore boast of a more ancient lineage than the railroad engine. ”

“ Underwood of the Erie once began naming his best engines after the men who habitually ran them, painting their names in large, conspicuous letters upon the engine-cabs, where in other days locomotives bore the names of presidents, governors, railroad directors, and others who sought a brief temporal glory. The French plan is best in that it permits flexibility in the assignment of the locomotives; the American plan best in that it confers an even greater and more permanent distinction upon the engine-driver. ”

“ In one a train is the unit and in the other a car. As the context shows, a train in the sense intended consists of an engine and cars which have been assembled and coupled together for a run or trip along the road. When a train is thus made up and is proceeding on its journey it is within the operation of the air-brake provision. But it is otherwise with the various movements in railroad yards whereby cars are assembled and coupled into outgoing trains, and whereby incoming trains which have completed their run are broken up. ”

“ The proposition of the cars is generally treated quite apart from that of the locomotive, and separate shops under the direction of a master car-builder and his assistants are located at a few points upon the system, where they may be of fairly easy access. Rough repairs (the car-builders term these “light” repairs) to cars are carried forth at each division yard. This work is almost entirely confined to the freight equipment, and a good part of it goes upon “foreign” cars—cars that do not belong at all to the railroad making the repairs. ”

“ The motor trucks transport less than carload lots of freight in complete coordination with the rail service. The railroad instituted this additional method of transportation in order to furnish an improved and more convenient freight service to the public in certain areas of light traffic and in order to curtail car mileage and way-freight service. Motor vehicle transportation, in other words, is merely a new method of carrying on part of its all-rail freight business in which it had been engaged for many years. ”

“ It goes, like a good many other things in the railroad situation to-day, by default, and just so far lowers the service standard.
Our railroads in recent years have faced a new and formidable competitor in the rapid development in the United States of the automobile and, in consequence, of the improved highroad upon which it is wont to travel. I have called attention to this point before and wish again to emphasize it. Whether the privately owned and operated motor-car or the motor-bus operated for public patronage, it is a serious competitor to them. ”

“ They render a possible solution for one railroad problem—the problem of providing sufficient service for some branch where local traffic is slight. The gasolene car requires but two men, as against a minimum crew of five men for even the smallest steam passenger train. It can be quickly handled, will make many successive stops readily, and generally provides an efficient addition to the regular passenger equipment. ”

“ The original passenger cars, however frail and light they may have been, were at least, when shackled together in a train, continuous in their bearings on each other,—that is, their sills and floor timbers were all on a level and in line, so that, if the cars were suddenly pressed together, they met in such a way as to resist the pressure to the extent of their resisting power, and the floor of one did not quietly slide under or over that of another. ”

“ Yet upon the other hand a very considerable portion of the business community still seems to be at the rather definite conclusion that the motor-truck is to replace the railroad for freight hauls up to a hundred miles or less, while old-time railroaders for years past have been frank in saying that a freight-car did not even begin to make money until it had hauled its goods at least forty miles, and to-day the modern generation of operators will put this figure at eighty miles. ”

“ The average life of a car approximates twenty years, and the simplest of railroad economics demands that these cars be retained for their active life. [Pg 399] As they wear out steel cars can be, and they already are being, substituted by the great systems. ”

“ The railroad will probably build the greater part of its freight equipment, although in these days of the supplanting of wood by steel in car-construction the companies are apt to stand appalled at the cost of the steel working machinery, and to buy their cars direct from the manufacturers very much as they purchase their locomotives. Passenger equipment is almost invariably secured in this way. It is a big railroad indeed that seeks to construct for itself the huge travelling palaces that the passenger of to-day has come to demand for his comfort. ”

“ When the engine emerges from the paint-shop it is gorgeous and refulgent—brilliantly new. Unless it is going to foreign lands, when it must be partly dismantled and crated, it will ride its own wheels to the road which has purchased it. A string of new locomotives may be sprinkled through a freight train—never coupled together—in charge of an inspector from the locomotive company, who will bunk in one of the cabs and never leave his charges until they have been receipted for. ”

“ As for these very fast machines on the main roads, they should not be permitted. Every [100] railroad is forced to maintain gates at the crossings or to pass over or under the highways, though these trains rarely exceed forty miles an hour. Yet great autos are permitted to exceed sixty miles an hour down the crowded highways. ”

“ At the present day we can order any equipment which may best meet the requirement upon any railroad, and the order will be promptly met by any one of our great manufactories. But in the early days of the Western Railroad it was far otherwise, and the locomotive which should successfully and economically operate the hitherto unheard of grade of over 80 feet to the mile was yet to be seen. ”

“ American railroads may not go quite as much into gaudy car decoration as do the railroads of England and continental Europe. Each year the canons of simple good taste are driving the car-designers to plainer models, but no expense is spared to make car-surfaces, within and without, as bright and shiny as those of a private carriage or an automobile. ”

“ With the train equipped as it was, however, had these men, instead of crowding on their brakes and reversing their engines, simply shut off their steam and by a gentle application of the brakes checked the speed gradually and so as to avoid any strain on the couplings, the carriages would probably have held together and remained upon the road-bed. Instead of this, however, the sudden checking of the two ponderous locomotives converted them into an anvil, as it were, upon which the unfortunate leading carriage already off the rails was crushed under the weight and impetus of those behind it. ”

“ The famous pioneer train of August 9, 1831, over the Mohawk Valley road was literally made up in this way, the bodies of stage coaches having been placed on trucks, which "were coupled together with chains or chain-links, leaving from two to three feet slack, and when the locomotive started it took up the slack by jerks, with sufficient force to jerk the passengers, who sat on seats across the tops of the coaches, out from under their hats, and in stopping they came together with such force as to send them flying from their seats." ”

“ Therefore, instead of resting on the two sides of the truck, locomotives are made to bear on the centre of it, so that they are carried on it and on the two fulcrums of the equalizing levers, which gives the machine the adjustability due to the three-legged principle. When more than four driving-wheels are used the springs are connected together by equalizing levers, as shown in Figure 29 (p. 124) , which represents a consolidation engine as it appears before the wheels are put under it.
Having a vehicle which is adapted to running on a railroad track, it remains to supply the motive power. ”

“ All engines used on passenger trains had small driving-wheels and it will be remembered that all passenger trains, except One and Six, consisted of but a baggage-car and two coaches, consequently an engine could get a train under good headway much faster than engines with the heavy equipment in use at the present time. ”

“ The lead track crossed a 'hump,' and the work of car distribution consisted of pushing a train of cars by means of a locomotive to the top of the 'hump,' and then allowing the cars, in separate strings, to descend by gravity, under the control of hand brakes, to their respective destinations in the various branch tracks. ”